SPECIAL SECTION Who is a Naga village? The Naga 'village republic' through the ages Jelle J P Wouters Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 99–120 | ISSN 2050-487X | www.southasianist.ed.ac.uk 2017 | The South Asianist 5 (1): 99-120 | pg. 99 Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 99-120 Who is a Naga village? The Naga 'village republic' through the ages JELLE J P WOUTERS, Royal Thimphu College [email protected] This article engages historically and ethnographically the idea and idiom of the prototypical Naga ‘village republic.’ Even as the popular imagination of Naga villages as ‘republics’ traces back to colonial writings, and while much has changed since, I illustrate the remarkable resilience of the ‘Naga village’ as a political, partisan, self-protective and affective unit. I perceive the Naga village as encompassing a moral community characterized by its temporal and spatial rootedness, and whose inhabitants define themselves through the conduit of historical memory – a nexus locally between history, locality, ancestral genealogy, and identity – and which orients their relations with neighbouring and nearby villages and villagers. More specifically, I discuss the contemporary form and substance of the ‘Naga village’ in relation to (1) identity and identification, (2) local governance, particularly Nagaland’s policy of communitisation, and (3) democracy and elections. ‘Nothing much happens these days. We are just fulfilling our duty being here’, Chuba, a village defence guard in the Chang Naga hilltop village of Noksen, said while brewing ‘pica’, or black tea, to taste on a smouldering fire. Firewood was stacked close by. Lunch was to be prepared next. The place is Noksen’s village defence post, a makeshift fortification, erected a few steps above the village’s towering, newly built, neatly whitewashed Baptist church, but nonetheless complete with an underground escape route, a weapon and ammunition storage stocked with rifles and ammunition, and gun emplacements all around. Once upon a time this part of present-day Nagaland was not known as Tuensang District, as it is called today, but as ‘the land of the free Nagas’, or ‘Freeland’, in reference to its location outside the immediate pale of colonial offices and officers. Of the Chang Naga specifically, Hutton (1987[1929]: iii) wrote, in the 1920s, that they are ‘one of those Naga tribes which occupy the hinterland, as it were, of the Naga Hills District stretching 2017 | The South Asianist 5 (1): 99-120 | pg. 100 back to the high range, which divides Assam from Burma… the bulk of the tribe being situated in the area of loose political control…’ But despite being called ‘Freeland’ during the colonial era, many of its inhabitants did not consider themselves ‘free’ by the mid- 1950s and joined the A.Z. Phizo-led Naga National Council (NNC) in its armed struggle for Naga Independence. Amongst them were several Noksen villagers. Besides Chuba, four other men were on duty in the defence post, sitting clustered around the fire-place and wrapped into shawls to keep out the January cold. Their assigned duty: to ‘protect’ the village against Naga undergrounds of rivalling factions and with whose cadres, called ‘national workers’, the Noksen villagers shared complex and fluctuating relationships of kinship and resentment, sympathy and dislike, love and hate. Over the past decades, the political theory of the long running Naga Movement fragmented into a kaleidoscope of underground groups identified by often near identical initials – NSCN-IM, NSCN-K, NSCN-KK, NSCN-U, NSCN-R, NNC-NA, NNC-A, GPRN, FGN-NA, FGN-A – and which, to the eyes of villagers, seemed to be endlessly engaged in warring over historical legitimacy, ideological differences, territorial domination, and the collection of taxes and donations. In Noksen, it came to Chuba and his men to protect the villagers from the occasional lawlessness unleashed by one, or multiple, underground factions. While thus a militia of sorts, Noksen’s village guards wore sandals, casual sweaters and simple pants rather than sturdy army boots and neatly ironed uniforms embroidered with insignias and medals, and instead of busying themselves with daily patrols, routine roll-calls, and regimented training exercises, they spend most of their time playing Carrom board, cooking meals, and chewing betel-nut. But then, the salaries paid to them by the government were low; ‘next to nothing’, as Chuba complained. However, with duties few (only a handful of 12-hour shifts a month) and with agriculture the prime mainstay, any cash at the end of the month was always welcomed. The necessity of guarding one’s village against invaders and foes has long been intrinsic to Nagas’ political history, and in days now bygone Noksen villagers variously assumed the role of perpetuator and recipient of raids and retaliations. Before British pacification (a colonial euphemism for the slaying and subduing of recalcitrant populations), it was customarily for each Naga village to guard its village gates against intrusions, ever looming. In Noksen, it was traditionally and ritually the Houngang clan that was associated with the manufacture and maintenance of elaborate village defence walls, even as the task of actually guarding and protecting the village befell on every able-bodied man. Noksen was hardly exceptional in barricading its surroundings. When Mofatt-Mills toured the Angami Hills in 1854, he found most villages enclosed by ‘stiff stockades, deep ditches, bristling with panjies, and massive stone walls’ (Mofatt-Mills in Elwin 1969: 229). In times of war, Mofatt-Mills explained: 2017 | The South Asianist 5 (1): 99-120 | pg. 101 The hill sides are scraped and thickly studded with panjies. These panjies vary in length from 6 inches to 3 or 4 feet, and give very nasty wounds. Deep pit-falls, artfully concealed by a light layer of earth and leaves, line the path by which the enemy is expected. The entrances to the villagers are through long narrow tortuous lanes, with high banks of stone and earth on either side… admitting only of the passage of one man at a time. These lanes lead up to gates, or rather doorways closed by strong, thick, and heavy wooden doors made out of one piece of wood… When an attack is imminent the roads are often planted thickly with tall strong pegs, which are easily threaded when walking quietly, but are an effectual protection against a sudden rush (ibid: 229-230). While such elaborate defence works already impeded the entrance of unwelcome guests, in Noksen, akin to most Naga villages, the additional act of ‘watching’ over the village was a duty vested in morungs, or bachelor sleeping-houses, and of which each of Noksen’s four khels (also known as village wards or sectors) had one. ‘To guard the whole village was one of the most important duties of the members of the morung’, Mar Pongener (2011: 24) explains. Its members were deployed as ‘sentries at the village gates’ where they ‘kept vigil in turn throughout the day and night’ and ‘signal the possible intrusion of an enemy.’ But if such village and morung-wise defense strategies would frame Noksen’s current village guards in a continuous past, in their present form its concrete origins trace back to the late 1950s and to a controversial counter-insurgency strategy adopted by Indian military and paramilitary troops to counteract the then surging sway of the NNC. The NNC’s Naga Army relied on villages for food, shelter, monies, intelligence, and, of course, recruits, and it was in a classic attempt to separate ‘insurgents’ from ‘civilians’ that Indian Army officers sought to establish village militias. To persuade Naga villages into accepting this military scheme, special development packages were offered to consenting villages and monthly salaries, weaponry, and basic military training to those villagers who enlisted themselves as guards. A former Indian Army general recounted thus: ‘We supplied them [village defence guards] with smooth bore muskets and established camps to train them in musketry and simple field-craft. This force proved effective because I gave them the task of guarding only their own village’ (Thorat 1986: 83-4). Though most Naga villages swore fidelity to the NNC and could not be won over by the Indian Army, some villages heeded and accepted the enactment of a village defence post on its soil. In its effects, this policy was divisive, pitching certain Naga villages against the Naga Army. The NNC, on its part, labelled any village agreeing to a defence post as ‘pro-Indian’ and ‘reactionary’, and promised them a revenge that was lethal. For long, much longer compared to several neighbouring and nearby villages, Noksen withstood army pressures and resisted the enactment of a village defence post. ‘Some of our own boys were part of the Naga Army’, Chuba explained. ‘They were our fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons. How could we possibly accept weapons and training from the Indian Army to shoot at them?’ It was only after the gradual decline of the NNC from the mid-1970s onward, the rise of the NSCN in the 1980s, its subsequent 2017 | The South Asianist 5 (1): 99-120 | pg. 102 split into warring factions, and when earlier forms of annual ‘house-tax’ and ‘army-ration tax’ to the Naga Movement increasingly appeared like ‘extortion’ that Noksen gave in. A village defence post was built, paid for by the Indian Army, while a couple of dozen villagers were trained as guards. ‘Still then’, Chuba continued: We had an understanding with the Naga undergrounds. We told them that we would not attack them if they come to our village, but that they should inform us ahead of their coming. Although there exists a lot of division in the underground, they are our own people struggling for our future.